This is the last version of the standard E series eQ. The “242” type is the famous and rare equalizer from the early eighteen classic console. Cleaner and punchier than the Brown, you can crank it up but doesn’t distort. Instead, it saturates nicely while staying steady. With taller bell curves it’s perfect for vocals, acoustics instruments and electric guitars.
It’s the world’s most successful studio production console. Its reputation is built upon excellence of design, advanced electronic engineering and a sound quality that has produced hundreds of best-selling recordings. A key element in the sound of many of these recordings is the punch and drive of the mixes created by this classic ’80 console. This unit has been serviced and upgraded to give serious punch and animal power with unbelievable cleanness.
These were made by miking 6 different tube radios from the 1950’s. You might think it seems weird to make effects from tube radios, but forget about that- you should really think of these programs as distortion and tone sculpting power tools, with a lot of the familiar sound of miked speaker cabs. After the major ‘Revamped’ update, you can now crank these programs into overdrive, and each one offers a wide variety of tons and distortions you can use as a tool in your mixes! The update allows you to use each of the three main elements of these programs separately, or together in any combination, in any order, however you want. These elements include- the tone (miked speakers from tube radios), the distortion, and the compression (mainly from the tubes being saturated). For example you could even use parallel processing on a duplicate of a track in your DAW to generate and only take distortion from the program, completely muting the fundamental part of the sound. The result is that you have the original dry track, and a duplicate track being processed in a way where the only output is distortion. Now you could process that distortion separately in different ways, like apply chorus to it. Then you have an effect where only the distortion is being chorused, or reverbed, or whatever other effect you’d like to apply, only to the distortion. The sky (and your imagination) is the limit.
This is the classic sound of tube radios, captured with direct electrical connections. And now, I’ve revamped this collection entirely. You can still use the 34 different effects to get some vintage lo-fi tone with filtering and harmonics, but now you can bypass the filtering, leaving only the harmonic saturation. This opens the doors to a huge new range of uses. You can also now crank them into overdrive, and each one offers a wide variety of distortions you can use as a tool in your mixes! This wasn’t possible in the past, but now you can use these programs to produce loud distortions that can sound great.
These programs were originally created in 2011 and at that time they were one of the few releases for Nebula available that even attempted to push the distortion side of what Nebula could do. Now I consider these programs flawed in a lot of ways, but still think they are unique and fun to use, and can produce a huge variety of results useful in both mixing and sound design. I used five tube radios, an old Philco tube amp, a couple of PA amplifiers, and an assortment of other equipment to produce these programs. The Philco and two PA amps were used to overdrive the radios in many cases, but the Philco tube amp was also the focus of its own effects, being itself overdriven by the two PA amps. These programs were built like compressor programs. They have threshold, attack, and release controls, which allow you sculpt the results for more variety.
Much time and effort went into making sure that the end results were faithful to the classic sounding hardware, which was sold with several phonograph consoles back in the 1950’s. For the main portion of this library, the EQ, it was sampled in 3 different hardware setups, for 3 different flavors. The ‘bass’ knob mostly acts as an adjustable high pass, and ‘treble’ as a shelf. Together they can also be used to create ’tilt-like’ eq setups (check the freq response graphs in manual to see what’s possible). The filter FX side of the library is a (nice) bonus.
Slap back delays, repeating echoes, static flange, doubling, short feedback reverbs, distortion; all of this and more is possible with the Tube Delay Station. Delay times range from .2ms to 1.884 seconds, with choices in increments between .2 to 4ms, depending on the time range. The delay itself can be set to any of 63 different sampled tones, each with different frequency response profiles. Many filter the lows and/or highs in various ways, but some are almost perfectly flat, so there’s a lot of variety. There are also 9 sampled distortions you can combine with the main tones, for some subtle thickening, noticeable grit, or complete destruction. When using feedback along with a tone selection that filters the input, the repeating echoes get filtered more and more with each repeat. This can be used to produce evolving sonic textures and washes of sound. The pan control allows panning of the delay, and of course with feedback, each repeat moves further and further away from the center.
